A New Kickstarter From Monte Cook Games!

Monte Cook Games has just launched another Kickstarter! This one's for the Into the Ninth World series of sourcebooks for Numenera, which includes Into the Night, Into the Deep, and Into the Outside - supplements covering outer space, under the sea, and interdimensional realms, respectively. The series was announced just last week at Gen Con.

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With previous successful Kickstarters for Numenera itself, The Strange, and No Thank You, Evil, Monte Cook Games is firmly up there in the top tier of roleplaying game Kickstarter success stories. This one seeks $20,000 (but will no doubt exceed that many times over).

Into the Night is a 160 page hardcover which "takes Numenera players and GMs beyond the grip of Earth's gravity, to locations pioneered by the previous worlds on the moon, elsewhere in the solar system, and in remote reaches of the galaxy." It's slated for release just next month - it's already done, pretty much!

Into the Deep, in Spring 2016, delves into the oceans.

Into the Outside, Autumn 2016, is all about other dimensions and parallel universes. I'm betting this one's very Cordelly.

There's also a Numenera Artifact Deck, adding to the existing Creature and Cypher Decks.

Head on over here to check it out.

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[Dakion]

Funded nearly within first hour!

 

[turkeygiant]

I'm gonna watch this kickstarter, but I have some slowly growing qualms about Numenera as a game line. Despite being set in the "Ninth World" my biggest frustration with Numenera is that it really doesn't have a cohesive setting in any way. Strip away any mentions to the Ninth World and it becomes a generic game made up of a hodgepodge of completely unrelated characters, locations, and monsters. There is no real feeling of this being a real world. The other Cypher game line The Strange does a much better job of making everything feel connected which is actually ironic as it is the setting with a infinite number of worlds in infinite genres.

What I am hoping to see from Into The Night/Deep/Outside are setting books that actually feel like proper settings, where the various components introduced in the book actually have connections to each other and are more than just 160 pages of unrelated plot hooks.

 

[Dracones]

That's sort of the good and bad with Numenera, it's such a mix up of settings. You have all these isolated locations with any level of tech you can imagine. So it's entirely possible you might have an area that's basically medievel tech with castles and lords while another part of the planet is Logan's Run.

As a GM it's sort of nice because you can basically do anything you want with it. But at the same time, yeah, the world is all very disconnected and not cohesive.

 

[Mercurius]

I don't understand why clearly successful game companies still do Kickstarter. Is it just a matter of guaranteeing sales? Is it clearly more profitable to do so? Should Apple do a Kickstarter for the iPhone 7?

 

[Morrus]

I don't understand why clearly successful game companies still do Kickstarter. Is it just a matter of guaranteeing sales? Is it clearly more profitable to do so? Should Apple do a Kickstarter for the iPhone 7?

Not every company has to use the same business model. But for MCG, Kickstarter works extremely well. It combines promotion with market research, and minimises risk.

 

[Dracones]

I don't understand why clearly successful game companies still do Kickstarter. Is it just a matter of guaranteeing sales? Is it clearly more profitable to do so? Should Apple do a Kickstarter for the iPhone 7?

1> It let's them gauge the sales interest in a product while in the pre-production stage.

2> The kickstarter "event" ends up being a pretty good focus for marketing. It's like a big launch party.

3> It saves money because they can bulk up on their ordering back end since they have guaranteed sales already. Ex/ It's cheaper to print and ship 10k pre-sold books than an initial order of 1k that may or may not sell out in a week.

iPhone is different. It's just a revision of an already popular product. No real risk there. They also already have their own launch events for new products.

But imagine if Microsoft could've done a Kickstarter for Zune and they set a decently high dollar amount on it to actually gauge if people would've bought it or not to make it worthwhile. It probably wouldn't have funded(people didn't want it) and they would've avoided sinking a ton of cash into the production and marketing of it.

 

[SpiffyOne]

I don't understand why clearly successful game companies still do Kickstarter. Is it just a matter of guaranteeing sales? Is it clearly more profitable to do so? Should Apple do a Kickstarter for the iPhone 7?

Imagine being able to sell your product to 20,000 people at pretty close to (if not more than) full retail & have virtually NO middlemen taking their cut. $CHING$

 

[turkeygiant]

That's sort of the good and bad with Numenera, it's such a mix up of settings. You have all these isolated locations with any level of tech you can imagine. So it's entirely possible you might have an area that's basically medievel tech with castles and lords while another part of the planet is Logan's Run.

As a GM it's sort of nice because you can basically do anything you want with it. But at the same time, yeah, the world is all very disconnected and not cohesive.

Yeah the variety the system offers is pretty great, I just wish it tied these diverse areas and ideas together a little better, maybe a little more like Golarion. The Ninth World is more of a plot hook dartboard than a setting.

 

[Will Doyle]

The art for Numenera is just beautiful.